Obama's Liberal and Minority Base Erodes in New Poll

Amidst the debt deal posturing, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll finds wilting support for the Obama's jobs record among unlikely constituencies: liberal Democrats and African Americans. It isn't just Obama, of course. Those polled were simmeringmad at nearly every D.C. power broker at this moment. Still, the sharp erosion, as The Post deemed it, comes while he is trying to muster support for his vision for reducing the deficit. From the poll:

The Post-ABC poll found that the number of liberal Democrats who strongly support Obama’s record on jobs plunged 22 points from 53 percent last year to 31 percent. The number of African Americans who believe the president’s actions have helped the economy has dropped from 77 percent in October to just over half of those surveyed.

The Pew Research Center published a new wealth-disparity report today that shows just how much of an impact the financial collapse has had on minority households economic standing. It found that median net worth among black households has dropped 53 percent from 2005 to 2009. The percentage decrease was even more dramatic for Hispanic households, which saw median wealth decline 66 percent. The result has been a steady increase in the wealth dsiaparity between white and minority households, the study found:

The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from 2009. These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these three groups for the two decades prior to the Great Recession that ended in 2009.

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